Friday, March 4, 2011

[Self-proclaimed heroic troll "The_Autodidact" has sent me this guest review. I haven't actually read it so whatever. -Ed.]

THE PLACE: the bedroom of a one-man apartment, somewhere in Massachusetts.

THE TIME: Thursday, March 3, 2011, between the hours of 11 PM and 12 AM

A young man sits alone at a desk, watching his favorite video series: an internet atheist who makes video responses to Youtube comments written by creationists. He chuckles as the video comes to a close. “Looks like science once again has triumphed!” he says aloud. He closes the tab, opening the one for Facebook. It is, of course, on her page. The one who denied him. The only one who didn’t appreciate his genius (Besides that one fatass). The one who never laughed at his sex jokes, even when they were about her. The one who, for reasons he could never fathom, seemed offended by his constant requests to drink her breastmilk. That ungrateful bitch. Doesn’t she know how great a compliment that is? He is of course not her “friend”, and can unfortunately not see her pictures, but the very sight of her name makes his penis turgid. He can’t help himself. His hand, seemingly of its own accord, slowly works its way into his stained briefs.

“OK, no more mister sadsack,” he says as his tearful masturbation sessions comes to a close. “Time to remind the world that you are Randall Motherfucking Munroe: Internet Comedian”. He pulls up Weechat and reads through the last few pages of his favorite chatroom. He cracks his knuckles (taking a moment to laugh at all the gullible fools who have never read Wikipedia’s “list of common misconceptions” and believe this causes arthritis) and delivers a barrage of witty one-liners, one after the other. Chortling at his own wit, he copies the brilliant zingers and posts them on his favorite fora, for posterity’s sake. He then opens up TV Tropes Wiki, his second-favorite wiki ever. He reads through trope after trope, guffawing at his fellow tropers’ wit, or at least what is left of it after the fascist admins decided the wiki should be a Wikipedia clone. He comes across a familiar article, and notices something missing. “The page image”, he shouts. “They changed it, those damn bastards! I had uploaded that image myself, as it was my favorite comic! Wait a minute. Oh no, the comic!”

He suddenly remembers the comic, that thing that makes it so he doesn’t have to go to (or goto, as the case might be. He snickers as he writes that one down for later) work like some kind of common pleb. He pulls a sheet of white paper out of his printer and gets to work on the latest t-shirt ad. “OK Randall, you can do this alright,” (he stops to laugh at the thought of all the pedantic English majors squirming at his misuse of the word, if only they could hear it) “Just put something down and I’m certain something will come to you”. He haphazardly scrawls the first shape that comes to mind: a diamond. (Being a scientist, of course, he knows it’s just a square rotated 45 degrees, not a carbon crystal. Silly plebs.) “I always can fall back on a chart,” he says, and draws an “x” to denote it as such. “My audience, being geeks, of course loves chart humor. It takes a sophisticated mind to appreciate. Now what could this be? A Punnett square? No, I of course already made fun of biology yesterday. But who else does use this kind of chart? Wait, libertarians! That’s it!” He scrawls the word in his semi-legible print in the top quadrant. “I am sure many of my compatriots have encountered libertarians who care about charts! So obviously that makes the first axis ‘politics’. The next one can be…meta humor! Yes! Something that only sophisticated geeks like myself can understand! The other axis is ‘people who like diamond-shaped diagrams’! So that puts libertarians at top, other politicians on the left, but who else cares about diamond-shaped charts? Wait! What’s that thing that jocks like, that is on a diamond-shaped thing? Base…ball? Yes! ‘Baseball’! Now for the last quadrant. Um…people who don’t care about politics or diamonds….screw it, I’ll just put ‘other’! There! Now all that I need is a title. What are those charts called again?” He browses Wikipedia until he finds the article in question. “Yes, Nolan charts! That’s perfect! Surely no lowly sheeple will be getting THIS reference!” He scans the comic, cleans it up in Photoshop, and uploads it onto his site. “Oh Randall” he says, shaking his head in disbelief at his own brilliance. “You are definitely a genius!”

PS: Ayn Rand was an incompetent hack and all libertarians are BASICALLY sociopaths. Discuss.

Ayn Rand is bullshit. I must disagree with the sociopathic remark because Libertarianism ≠ anything to spew out of her mouth nor any other objectivist (which is actually everything Neitzsche ever said regurgitated in a 'new' philosophy. Anyone who ascribes to Rand's beliefs is either confused or too young to know better anyhow. They're not sociopaths because usually the grow up to learn otherwise. Some of them grow up and turn into Leonard Peikoff and then they are sociopaths.

in MY experience, most people with strong political opinions think that political questions have simple answers; are not familiar with the concept of research; and are mainly voicing their emotions, rather than arguing.

among these, the libertarians are the ones whose emotions are hatred of people and desire of consumer goods.

I could not help but notice that Rob has yet to publicly deny that his alleged dislike for XKCD is motivated by his intense Islamic extremism. I would not, however, discount the possible covert agency of one or more of the lesser known malevolent Djinn as the cause of this apparent detestation.The fact remains though: Rob hates Randall’s freedom!

Whether you are clever or not is indeed debatable. I can, however, attest to your ignorance of the Queen's English.The phrase 'as well' should directly follow the word 'others'. You have split a verb phrase, ya daft cunt! Besides, phrasal vebs should be avoided when ever possible.

Hey, I worked out what 'other' is: Neo Nazis, Black Panthers and the Peoples Front of Judea. Also, Libertarianism is a Nazi-Muslim-Judeo-French conspiracy to restore the House of Bourbon to the throne and retake America, you know like the Bible says.

As a self-proclaimed libertarian, I think Nolan chart is bullshit. Personal and economic freedom are not orthogonal, but lie on the same axis. People who think there could exist personal freedom without economic freedom are simply delusional. In other words, communists are fucking retarded. Discuss.

"....People who think there could exist personal freedom without economic freedom are simply delusional....."

Yes if your economic model is premised on market-based consumption. There are other models where personal freedom can be maximised and the concept of 'economic freedom' is meaningless.I've been to places like that and the beer sucks - nothing like the profit motive and invisible hand to make a good beer I say.

Aquarians Love To Fuck, Monty Python crap started prior to that but you weren't savvy enough to notice it.

Timofei, collective personal freedom can not exist without a level of social restrictions so take your libertarian hogwash and wash your hog with it. That's a hilarious pun for thos who agree with me because "hog" is slang for a motorbike and motorbikes are endemic to bikie gangs-- an image of sociopathic freedom.

Or maybe I'm the one missing something as I don't really know how to read such a diagram. The way I figured it, the Democrats and Republicans are being represented as over-opinionated, the baseball fans are being represented as under-opinionated, the libertarians are being represented as both over-opinionated and enjoying diamond-shaped diagrams, and every other position apparently takes a balanced view of these things.

@Anonymous 4:23: Not really an excuse. By "other political parties" I meant American ones: the Green Party, the Constitution Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, and others, not to mention independents... Surely they're just as opinionated as Republicans and Democrats, maybe more so in some cases.

But he could be trying to joke that the two big parties are more blindly opinionated than the others. It might not be true (in fact I doubt it is considering that Democrats and Republicans would be more interested in maintaining power than anything else), but when has he ever let the truth get in the way of his insights?

I mean, since when have baseball fans loved charts shaped like diamonds? That's just the layout of the field. And do libertarians love any other diamond shaped chart than the Nolan Chart, which appears to only be used with just the one set of labels to make just the one point?

Indeed Robdall, if you GIS or visit Wikipedia you will find diamond charts in the top results, but in actual real world use the diamond form is rare. Oh and that fucking site is worse torture than xkcd itself, I refreshed a dozen times and just couldn't bring myself to click on anything.

Oh I had a rant here earlier but lost it, it was like this. 'Other' is fucking lazy and I just spent more time thinking about this sentence than randy did about 'other'. Baseball lovers love diamond charts because... well fuck this is almost as lazy as 'others' and equally humourous, entertaining and competent. It's almost like he imagines baseball fans all suffer from aspergers and obsess over diamond shapes or some shit, oh and they're morons who don't get into politics because JOCKS LULZ! Lastly, haha, yeah wow it's so funny that there are lots of libertarian 'What is your political spectrum' sites that are rigged with heavily biased questions to make it look like every motherfucker who's not Hitler or Stalin is libertarian. Or perhaps he thinks he is a libertatian, sorry INTERNET libertarian on the INTERNET because that makes such a fucking difference as to political views, ahem anyway yeah and he really loves these fucking retarded 'tests', hey and what the fuck is up with dem and repub in the same box anyway and AAARGHHHWBGRBL

I like this parody. Cuts straight to the original purpose of the Nolan Chart and the smallest political quiz:

http://billstclair.com/blog/images/NewNolanChart.gif

I like the blatant propaganda involved in turning the Nolan chart 45 degrees - the libertarians go on top and central, and the standard Liberal/Republican stay lower down and look more like extremists.

Republicans should change the 'more personal freedom' axis to 'moral fortitude' - then they can go on top. Liberals can switch 'economic freedom' with 'egalitarianism'.

You know what? This blog used to have its moments. It used to be funny, even insightful.Carl was good at picking apart XKCD, and he was even able to make good posts about the occasional mediocre-to-good comics.

Then Carl left, and it's the same Randy's-obsessed-with-meg shit over and over and fucking OVER again. Seriously, Rob, you bitter, obsessive, talentless hack, just let this die.

bitter? maybe, though not bitter at or because of XKCD.obsessive? again, maybe, but not at or because of XKCD. (I'm self-obsessed, obviously, though I don't think that qualifies me for being 'obsessive' by most uses of the word)talentless? it's hard to be talented when you are actively trying not to be, so i'll accept that onehack? definitely!

The US needs an actual radical socialist party that shits on everyone else for being insufficiently socialist, and accuses them of being libertarians. That would be effective at catching the radical right with their "accepting that other humans have worth = OMG STALIN" shit.

I actually thought this writeup was great. It is probably the most accurate representation of Randal's work schedule ever (the whole not giving two shits about his 'art' thing). With shit like this comic it's hard to believe he spent more than 10 minutes on it.

@10:38, I'm not so sure that's entirely correct; it seems like the "phone" character is just Randy, while the "server" character is all the people Randy perceives as assholes, yet they run the servers his phone connects to.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.